76TH SEASON OF CONCERTS OCTOBER 1, 2017 / NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART Program

Curtis on Tour Maria Ioudenitch, violin Andrea Obiso, violin Roberto Díaz, viola Michael Casimir, viola Joshua Halpern, cello Young In Na, cello

OCTOBER 1, 2017 / 3:30 WEST BUILDING, WEST GARDEN COURT

Kevin Puts ( b. 1972) Arcana

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791) Grande Sestetto Concertante (after Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364) Photo by Pete Checchia Allegro maestoso Andante Presto

Intermission

Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) String Sextet in B-flat Major, no. 1, op. 18 Allegro ma non troppo Andante ma moderato Scherzo: Allegro molto Rondo: Poco allegretto e grazioso

Program subject to change.

2 3 The Musicians MARIA IOUDENITCH Maria Ioudenitch, from Balashov, Russia, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC 2014 and studies violin with Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pamela Frank. Ioudenitch has Drawing upon ninety years of artistry, the Curtis Institute of Music pairs tradition appeared as a soloist with the Kansas City and Tupelo Symphonies; the Mississippi and innovation, educating exceptionally gifted young musicians as artist-citizens who Symphony Orchestra; the Mariinsky Orchestra; the Prince George’s Philharmonic; engage local and global communities through music-making of the highest caliber. and the National Symphony of Uzbekistan. Her awards include first prize at the Each year, 175 students come to Curtis, drawn by a tuition-free, performance-inspired Kansas City Young Artist Competition and second prize at the Johansen International learning culture that is nurtured by a celebrated faculty. The school’s distinctive Competition for Young String Players. Ioudenitch was also invited to perform for “learn by doing” approach results in more than two hundred concerts each year in Van Cliburn at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of his triumph at the First Philadelphia, as well as performances around the world through Curtis on Tour. Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, and she has been heard on Known as one of the world’s finest music academies, Curtis reaches global NPR’s From the Top. audiences through Curtis Performs, the school’s dedicated HD performance video Ioudenitch has attended Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute and has participated in site. Online music courses and Curtis Summerfest programs offer lifelong learners master classes with Midori, Gil Shaham, and Pinchas Zukerman, as well as master other ways to listen, explore, and learn. And students hone twenty-first-century classes at the International Summer Academy at Universität Mozarteum. She began skills through social entrepreneurship programs that bring arts access and education studying violin at age three and piano at age nine. Her previous teachers include to the community. Gregory Sandomirsky and Ben Sayevich. The extraordinary young musicians of Curtis graduate to join 4,000 alumni who have long made music history. Each season, leading orchestras, opera houses, and ANDREA OBISO chamber music series around the world feature Curtis alumni. They are in the front Andrea Obiso, from Palermo, Italy, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2016 rank of soloists, composers, and conductors and hold principal chairs in every major and studies violin with Aaron Rosand. Obiso made his solo debut with the Orchestra American orchestra. Curtis graduates are musical leaders, making a profound impact Sinfonica Siciliana at the age of twelve. Since then, he has appeared as soloist with on music onstage and in their communities. Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, Orchestra del Teatro Massimo Bellini di Catania, Orkest der Lage Landen, the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, Limburgs CURTIS ON TOUR Symfonie Orkest, the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia, and the Central Aichi Curtis on Tour is the Nina von Maltzahn Global Touring Initiative of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, among several other ensembles. Institute of Music. An embodiment of the school’s “learn by doing” philosophy, Obiso appears frequently on television and radio in Italy. Among his many it offers students professional touring experience alongside celebrated alumni awards are second prize at the 2015 Aram Khachaturian International Violin and faculty. In addition to performances, musicians offer master classes, interactive Competition, the Special Prize for Virtuosic Performance at the Sixth International programs, and community engagement activities while on tour. Curtis on Tour Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians, and first prizes in another eleven also facilitates solo performances of Curtis students and alumni with professional competitions across Italy. orchestras and recital series. Since the program was established in 2008, students, Obiso began violin lessons at age six. He holds degrees in violin performance faculty, and alumni have performed more than two hundred concerts in Europe, from the Conservatorium Maastricht and Conservatorio di Musica Vincenzo Bellini, Asia, and the Americas. where he studied with Boris Belkin. Obiso performs on a 1741 Joseph Guarneri del Gesù violin on loan from the Yellow Angel nonprofit organization.

4 5 ROBERTO DÍAZ JOSHUA HALPERN

A violist of international reputation, Roberto Díaz is president and CEO of the Joshua Halpern, from Dayton, Ohio, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2016 Curtis Institute of Music. As a soloist, Díaz collaborates with leading conductors and studies with Carter Brey, principal cello of the New York Philharmonic, and of our time on stages throughout the world. He also has worked directly with Peter Wiley, former cellist of the Guarneri Quartet. Halpern is the Crescendo Club important composers, most notably Krzysztof Penderecki, whose viola concerto Annual Fellow at Curtis. He has won top prizes at the Fischoff National Chamber he has performed numerous times with the composer on the podium and whose Music Association Competition, the Music Teachers National Association Senior Double Concerto he premiered in the United States. Strings Competition, and the Shepherd School of Music Concerto Competition. He A frequent recitalist, Díaz enjoys collaborating with young musicians, bringing has performed as a soloist with the Miami Valley Symphony and Starling Chamber a fresh approach to the repertoire. He has performed with major string quartets Orchestras and will appear with the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra in the and pianists in chamber music series and festivals worldwide and is a member of the 2017 – 2018 season. Díaz Trio. His recordings include a Grammy-nominated disc of viola transcriptions As a chamber musician, Halpern has collaborated with such artists as Itzhak by William Primrose for Naxos, as well as releases on the Artek, Bridge Records, Perlman, Jon Kimura Parker, and Richie Hawley and has worked with Gary Hoffman, Dorian, Nimbus, and New World labels. Laurence Lesser, Robert McDonald, and members of the Borromeo and Emerson In addition to his decade-long tenure as principal viola of the Philadelphia Quartets. He has participated in several festivals, including Music Academy of the Orchestra, Díaz was also principal viola of the National Symphony under Mstislav West, the Taos School of Music, the Perlman Music Program, Ravinia’s Steans Music Rostropovich and a member of the Boston Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestras. Institute, and the New York String Orchestra Seminar. He is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Curtis Institute Halpern holds a bachelor of music degree from the Shepherd School of Music of Music, where he continues to serve on the faculty, holding the James and Betty at Rice University. He began cello lessons at the age of ten and has previously studied Matarese Chair in Viola Studies and the Nina von Maltzahn President’s Chair. Díaz with Desmond Hoebig and Alan Rafferty. plays the ex-Primrose Amati viola. YOUNG IN NA

MICHAEL CASIMIR Young In Na, from Seoul, Korea, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2013 and Michael Casimir, from Philadelphia, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2015 studies cello with Peter Wiley. All students at Curtis receive merit-based, full-tuition and studies viola with Roberto Díaz and Hsin-Yun Huang. Casimir appeared as a scholarships, and Na is the Joseph Druian Fellow. Na has performed as a soloist with soloist with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in 2014, after winning first place in the the Yewon Orchestra and has been featured on the Korean Broadcasting System, as orchestra’s string competition in 2013. His other solo appearances include venues in well as the European cultural channel ARTE. She has also played solo and chamber South Africa, Spain, Brazil, and Japan. Casimir has collaborated with many renowned recitals in Trio Dono with the support of Kumho Asiana. musicians, including Shmuel Ashkenasi, Emanuel Ax, and Christoph Henkel. In Na has participated in the Calahorra Music Festival in Spain and the Montpellier 2016, he performed with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. His other honors Music Festival in France. She has been a finalist or prizewinner in several competi- include second-place prizes at the Sphinx Competition in 2011 and 2015. tions, including the 2012 Johansen International Competition in Washington, DC, the Casimir, who began violin lessons at the age of two, received his bachelor of 2009 and 2010 Junior Tchaikovsky Competitions, and the 2009 Moscow Tchaikovsky music degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Heidi Castleman and Central Music School International String Junior Competition. Misha Amory. His other teachers have included Lee Snyder, Peter Slowik, and Milan Vitek. He has attended the Tanglewood Music Center, the Greenwood Music Camp, the Heifetz International Music Institute, the Perlman Music Program, and the Sejong International Music Festival.

6 7 Program Notes Johannes Brahms completed his String Sextet in B-flat Major, no. 1, op. 18, in 1860. It is in four movements and slightly less than forty minutes in duration. The About his work Arcana, composer Kevin Puts writes: composer was still in his twenties when he wrote this work, and while it clearly Each night on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the immense bears his artistic stamp, it also betrays the strength of his early influences, including volcano Haleakala sleeps soundly by the light of moon until Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Early works such as these make it some- around three AM when several dozen tourists create an unbroken times difficult to determine the true direction of Brahms’s musical vision except parade of headlights along the long and winding drive to the that he loved the music that had been coming out of Vienna for the past hundred summit. The sunrise as witnessed from here was described by years. However, it is also true that the full romantic writing of the generation Mark Twain as one of the “sublimest spectacles” of his life, and directly preceding his own — that of Schumann, who discovered and promoted what it reveals is equally remarkable. In absolute silence above Brahms — is absent in Brahms’s compositions. This first sextet reveals an especially the cloud layer below, a Martian terrain of red dust and oddly acute understanding of Schubert’s later writing. There is as much classical order placed meteoric-looking rock plays host to a number of arcane in this sextet as romantic leanings. The use of a string sextet as an ensemble was sights: the ‘ ¯a hinahina (silversword) plant must have been even comparatively new. Louis Spohr (1784 – 1859) provided the only notable precedent. more alien to the ancient Hawaiians who presumably had Brahms is also partial to certain baroque conventions, such as the fugato in the nothing else silver in their lives. It lives for fifty years and Andante second movement. only flowers once, then dies. Exotic birds such as petrels, The first String Sextet was written in the summertime, while Brahms was honeycreepers, and the rare nene (Hawaiian goose) squawk vacationing on the banks of the Elbe. Its ineluctable, Viennese strains seem to come about. At the bottom of the enormous crater, giant cinder cones through in spite of his pride in being a tough kid from Hamburg. The sweetness of rise up like something out of the old Star Trek episodes. But as Vienna’s indigenous sound comes through in this work, which is perhaps why it keeps the eye continues along to the east towards the town of Hana, reconfiguring its textures, resisting the urge to bathe in the loveliness of the city’s the austerity of dust and hardened lava gives way to a scene of soundscape. That was the bizarre danger about Vienna that this sextet works with; it almost impossible beauty, a tumbling waterfall of clouds pouring is a city that loves music, especially its waltzes and its famous composers. Becoming endlessly over the crater’s rim and dissolving into thin air. part of that scene can easily reduce a musician to an imitator, making Vienna undesir- able, yet it is ironically a mecca for composers. While Wagner and Schumann broke The magnificent Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364, for violin, viola, and with Vienna’s expectations, Brahms worked with them, loved the city’s paradox, and orchestra, is Mozart’s only surviving complete work of this type, which is essentially a never allowed musical sleaze to get the upper hand. His music is so eventful because hybrid of a symphony and a concerto. Generally scored for two or more solo instru- he did not want to be pinned onto a dance floor laden with waltzing Viennese locals. ments and orchestra, the sinfonia concertante form was particularly popular in Paris It was a strange risk to take but it resulted in wonderfully enduring music. in the eighteenth century. In 1808, an unknown arranger made a transcription of Mozart’s great work for string sextet, heard on today’s program. It should be noted that Curtis on Tour performed the complete, original work here at the Gallery in January 2017. Those in the audience who were fortunate to have heard that perfor- mance may hear some subtle differences between the original and the scaled-down versions, most notably that instead of two soloists and an orchestra behind them, all six instruments play equal roles throughout the piece. Known for its warm expansiveness, the work is set in three movements: The opening Allegro maestoso bursts with joy, yet is followed by one of Mozart’s rare, minor-key slow movements, a plaintive and lengthy Andante. The final Presto brings back the joyful spirit, with irrepressible gaiety.

8 9 Upcoming Events of the Seventy- Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Sixth Season of The William Octets by Jean Françaix Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot and Franz Schubert Belin Concerts November 5, 3:30 — Unless otherwise noted, all programs The Crossing take place in the West Building, With members of ICE West Garden Court. Music by Ted Hearne, David Lang, — and Caroline Shaw The Canales Project, in partnership November 12, 3:30 with TEDxMidAtlantic — Sandeep Das, tabla Mantra Percussion Lara Downes, piano Michael Gordon, Timber Kaoru Watanabe, shinobue bamboo flute Celebrating Jackson Pollock’s Mural October 8, 3:30 November 19, 3:30 — —

Dalí Quartet LACE (Living Art Collective Ensemble) With Orlando Cotto, percussion Salon-style concerts with music by Music by Ricardo Lorenz, Guido López- Boccherini, Brillon, and Mozart Gavilan, and Jorge Mazón–Rico Melao Celebrating Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures October 15, 3:30 November 24 – 25, 2:00 & 4:00 — West Building, East Garden Court Lina Bahn, violin, and — Matt Haimovitz, cello New York Opera Society With Artichoke Dance Company The Three Lives of Rosina Almaviva Voices of the Ocean Celebrating Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures October 22, 3:30 November 26, 3:30 — — Pomerium Inna Faliks and Daniel Schlosberg Flemish Musical Mastery in the Gustav Mahler, Symphony no. 6, Mary Heilman, Melody, 1998, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Kathan Brown Age of Bosch and Bloemaert arranged for piano, four-hands, Celebrating Bosch to Bloemaert: Early by Alexander von Zemlinsky Netherlandish Drawings from the Museum December 3, 3:30 Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam — October 29, 3:30 Caroling in the Rotunda December 9, 10, 16 & 17, 1:30 & 2:30 Admission to the National Gallery of Art and all of its programs is free of charge, except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equip- ment during the performance is not allowed. Please be sure that all portable electronic devices are turned off.

The department of music produced these program notes. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Concerts are made possible in part through the generosity of donors to the National Gallery of Art through The Circle. Reserved seating is available in recognition of their support. Please contact the development office at (202) 842-6450 or [email protected] for more information. www.nga.gov/music